


Inside the Lines

by Brightknightie



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Armistice Day, Belgium (Country), Children, Civilians in war, First Meetings, Gen, Historical, Lace, Remembrance Day, Veterans Day, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:33:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21777607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brightknightie/pseuds/Brightknightie
Summary: Life under German occupation has enough challenges. Ceirdwyn doesn't need the immortal kind of challenge on top of it.
Comments: 25
Kudos: 41
Collections: Highlander Secret Santa (ShortCuts) 2019





	Inside the Lines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lferion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lferion/gifts).



_**Late 1916  
Ethe, Gaume, occupied Belgium** _

“Kaat!” The little girl pelted up the path to the cottage. “Kaat!”

“I’m right here, darling,” Ceirdwyn called back. She kept her eyes on the padded frame on her lap. The stiff cushion bristled with pins, around which she’d wound, woven, and knotted this week’s precious thread allotment. Her hands in constant motion, she kept the bobbins dancing into lace.

It was the first sunny day in what seemed like months. Despite the winter cold, Ceirdwyn had brought her work out into the light and sent the girls to hunt potatoes. Ceirdwyn knew there were none, long since, but the children needed a task in the sunshine. And she needed some peace and quiet — at least, as much as came between the shattering cannon booms, never far enough away.

Besides, with root vegetables, there was always hope.

“What did you find?” she asked.

Little Marie reached the top of the slope. “Strangers on the river road,” she panted. “Grown-ups. Three.”

Ceirdwyn’s hands stilled. Then swiftly, but carefully, she secured her bobbins and stood. “Soldiers?” If there had been a motor-car, Marie would have mentioned it. So it couldn’t be occupation officials or high-ranking military. That still left too many possibilities.

“I don’t know. They have coats.”

“Lucky them,” Ceirdwyn murmured under her breath. She and the girls wore shawls re-knitted from donated sweaters that came in the American relief; the English blockade kept out wool — and almost everything else — lest the Germans seize it. Ceirdwyn set her work on her chair. “Are your sisters still in the field? I’ll fetch them. Can you run on to the mayor’s house? Spread the word and stay until I come for you.”

Marie took a deep breath and ran one direction.

Ceirdwyn hiked her skirt and ran the other. 

When Ceirdwyn reached the field, she scooped up toddler Alice in one arm and held out her other hand to Lina, the middle sister. Lina opened her mouth, but, seeing Ceirdwyn’s expression, swallowed her questions and came at once. Ceirdwyn strode off as fast as the child could keep up.

Should they try to join Marie at the mayor’s? Go on to the church? Or just enter the cottage, take a deep breath, and make-believe they dwelt in a civilized world?

Ceirdwyn and the girls topped the rise above the river road. Mid-stride, Ceirdwyn froze. One of those approaching was immortal. She felt it. So the other felt her, too. She closed her lips on a curse in a tongue only she remembered.

Lina pulled a step ahead and looked back in confusion.

Ceirdwyn squeezed the girl’s hand and resumed walking. Her mind raced. Her sword was at the cottage. Even if it weren’t, her hands were full. Literally and figuratively. No matter how much she might want to, she couldn’t risk throwing herself into battle while she was all the girls had. Neither could she risk a headhunter targeting them to reach her.

Not that the choice was hers.

This morning, she’d worried only — only! — about food and soap being so scarce, the regime’s _affiches_ growing ever stricter, and the slave raids now seizing Belgians to work in Germany. 

She hated when her responsibility to live fell before her obligation to the Game.

“Hello, there!” a man called in faintly accented French. “May we speak with you?” He then repeated himself in Flemish with more of an accent. American, maybe, or Canadian.

Ceirdwyn stopped. She moved her hand to Lina’s shoulder and turned, slowly, to face the party coming up the gentle slope. Two men, one woman. Coats, indeed: felt, sheepskin, and fur. The woman and one man looked middle-aged, snug in hats, scarves, and gloves. The other man looked much younger, perhaps just by being clean-shaven. He also looked colder, as he went hatless, the wind ruffling his black hair, and scarfless, revealing a sporty bow tie. He kept his hands plunged in deep pockets. When that man met her eyes, Ceirdwyn knew he was the immortal.

She inclined her head in acknowledgment. He made no matching gesture; his polite, detached expression didn’t flicker. He almost made her doubt the presence she felt.

“Does your village have an automobile mechanic, madam?” the older-looking man asked in French as the party drew closer. “We had a bit of an accident near the river.”

“‘A bit of an accident,’” the immortal repeated. His accent was American, and laugh-lines crinkled suddenly beside his eyes. “Our motor-car overturned.”

“Well, it was hardly on purpose, was it?” the first man demanded. “You Rhodes Scholars — Oxford men, hah! Boys, the lot of you! Speeding along on these cobblestone roads, setting a terrible example! How Mr. Hoover can trust you to oversee operations when I cannot—”

“Vernon,” the woman laid a hand on his arm. In a strong American accent, she continued, “Shouldn’t you introduce us?”

“Yes, of course, my dear. My apologies, madam.” He bowed slightly to Ceirdwyn and removed a case from an inner pocket to present her with a card. “Vernon Harris, the new Brussels director of the Commission for Relief in Belgium. My wife, Elizabeth. And this young enthusiast is your provincial delegate.”

“Piers Adamson, at your service,” the immortal introduced himself. Ceirdwyn had heard that the first CRB staff had been Americans studying in England; they’d been near to hand for their neutral country’s humanitarian intervention. He looked and sounded the part.

Would it be better or worse if he were what he appeared? Ceirdwyn wondered. She couldn’t take on a student now. Yet she also couldn’t let anyone run, ignorant, into a second, permanent death, without a clue, without a chance... No: If he didn’t know about immortality, he couldn’t stay so bland under the onslaught of her presence.

“Kaat Willems,” Ceirdwyn gave the name on her ration card. “I’m afraid that the nearest automotive professional was taken in one of the ... forced deportations.”

“He was unemployed?” Harris asked. “ _Chômeur_?”

Ceirdwyn’s eyebrows rose. Everyone knew the _chômeur_ lists were a bitter mockery. The Germans actively targeted skilled Belgian carpenters, blacksmiths, and farmhands, and would take anyone to free up more of their own men for the trenches.

Adamson coughed. “The Harrises recently arrived from America. They have a _Passierchschein_ to visit this far out, to observe local relief operations. But with the mud to either side of the road, and a surprisingly sharp curve—”

“Taken too quickly,” Harris grimaced, “on poor instructions.”

Mrs. Harris and Ceirdwyn shared a look. Ceirdwyn smiled. So Harris had been the driver, had he?

“Well, come on,” Ceirdwyn shook her head. She took Lina’s hand again and walked toward the cottage. “There may be a few older boys who can help you at least turn your motor-car right side up. Then you can push it where you need.”

The three fell in alongside Ceirdwyn and the girls. Harris hesitated, “Pardon, madam, but might there be a horse or mule we could hire to pull it?”

“You can ask. Most have been … requisitioned.” How they would plow in the spring, with few men and fewer animals, was a worry Ceirdwyn had shelved. Its day would come.

Lina let go of Ceirdwyn’s hand and ran ahead. She vanished inside the cottage, only to reappear as a pair of eyes at the corner of the curtain in the front room.

Ceirdwyn shifted Alice to her other arm and described how the Americans should continue on into the main village and down to the community hall. “You can’t miss it. And you’ll likely be met on your way. Please forgive any initial lack of hospitality; we’ve had some hard lessons.”

“We understand,” said Mrs. Harris, in her thick American French. “This is not the world any of us thought we grew up in.”

Ceirdwyn couldn’t help looking at her fellow immortal. What world had he grown up in? She’d survived her share of invasions and occupations — the Romans and English leaped to mind. A trampled people must stand when it can. But while the personal outrages of war had been the same since the dawn of time, this new scale and relentlessness shocked her, when she had the energy to be shocked. She thought of the smuggled, uncensored newspapers from outside that sometimes passed through her hands...

Adamson looked sad. Experience, innocence, or deception? Ceirdwyn couldn’t say. He did nod at her now, though, and it seemed to be the acknowledgement that he’d withheld before. They shared something. Like it or not.

“Oh, my!” Mrs. Harris exclaimed at the cottage doorstep. “You’re one of our fifty-thousand lace makers!” She leaned over Ceirdwyn’s work. “This is exquisite — machines will never compare. I especially admire the Belgian lion among the antique-style florets. Do you specialize in such insertions?”

Adamson said, “Mrs. Harris helps coordinate the CRB’s Lace Department with the Brussels Lace Committee.”

“I generally make lace trim by the meter,” Ceirdwyn answered her, blinking away a memory of first learning bobbin-lace one snowed-in winter, long ago, not far away. “Trims almost guarantee to sell. More ambitious patterns, like this one, sometimes sit in the warehouse in Rotterdam.”

“But you get paid either way, surely?” Harris cocked his head. “It’s a kilo of thread in, a kilo of lace out, for you, regardless, and then it’s up to the CRB to re-sell it in the allied or neutral countries.”

Ceirdwyn stared. A passing fantasy of disarming the director and forcing him to his knees flickered behind her eyes. She took a breath and found a brisk smile. “I like to think of my work as a little more than its passage through the blockade.”

“And so you should,” Mrs. Harris agreed. “Vernon, this is some of the best I’ve seen. It’s art. Madam Willems, my husband meant to ask, if he might, in his official capacity, whether your wages are fair? And,” she looked at Alice in Ceirdwyn’s arms, “sufficient?”

Ceirdwyn set Alice down and watched her toddle over to some rocks and twigs. “I have no reason to suspect money is disappearing into someone’s pocket along the way, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“But...?”

“Sufficient?” Ceirdwyn pressed her lips together. She looked at each American in turn, last at the immortal she couldn’t read. “If I had all the money in the world, what could I buy with it here and now?” She kept her volume low, for Alice and Lina. But she let her tone grow hard and sharp. “And if I could buy the world itself, would that give the girls back their parents? The Germans shot them at the start of this. The soldiers were so _offended_ that we fought back, like we were real citizens of a real country, that the ‘cock-pit of Europe’ didn’t just lie down for them...”

Ceirdwyn broke off. She was shaking with rage and grief. In two years, she hadn’t spoken of that day. It had spoken for itself among its survivors. It hadn’t been the first time her immortality had awakened her amidst the bodies of friends. To lose them like that was bad enough. She missed them so much. Yet it had been the first time she’d awakened from such a death to a child’s touch, and so been unable to leave, to go avenge her own, to kill the killers, because the girls needed her to stay and fight for their lives more than for their parents’ justice.

“It’s different with children, isn’t it?” Adamson said gently. “Adults feel like time grinds to a halt in war. But children change so fast. They grow, and learn, and expect Christmas — excuse me, St. Nicholas Day — no matter what.”

Ceirdwyn took a deep breath. Had they reached some understanding? “Yes. Even if all he can leave in their shoes is homemade paper dolls.”

Mr. Harris opened his mouth, but closed it when his wife put her hand on his sleeve.

Mrs. Harris said, “I’d like to place an order for another of this pattern you’re making now. Properly, through CRB arrangements, of course.” She appropriated one of her husband’s cards and a pen, to leave information for Ceirdwyn to take to her local exchange. When Mrs. Harris peeled off her winter gloves to write, a sleeve edged up; Ceirdwyn briefly glimpsed what she took for a pigmented birthmark, the blue-gray kind that usually disappears by adolescence.

After asking Lina to watch her little sister, Ceirdwyn escorted the Americans part-way to the village. She and Adamson lagged more and more behind the Harrises. When the couple was out of earshot, she said, “I am Ceirdwyn. If you challenge me, give me time to send the girls away.”

“No.”

“What?”

“If I were to challenge you, which I’m not looking to do at this time, I wouldn’t give you advance notice. You look like the kind of person who keeps her sword sharp — in addition to making lace, keeping children fed, clean, and sane, and, I don’t know, running an underground newspaper or resistance cell?”

“I am not running a— oh, you’re joking.” Ceirdwyn let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Will I see you again?”

“Only if you want to.” Adamson stretched his hands in his pockets. “I am your provincial delegate. But I rather like staying put at my desk, despite what Mr. Harris thinks about my driving.” Adamson pulled out a tiny brown-paper packet and handed it to her.

“What’s this?”

“Penny candy from the cinema in Virton. Too sweet for me. I bet it would go just right with paper dolls, though.”

Adamson waved jauntily and jogged off to catch up with the Harrisses.

Ceirdwyn sniffed the packet. Sugar and mint. She tucked it in her belt, as her skirt lacked pockets. 

Then she returned to Alice and Lina, so that they could all go together to collect Marie from the mayor’s.

  
_**November 11, 2018  
Ypres, Belgium** _

Red poppy petals drifted down from the ceiling of the Menin Gate. Bagpipes played. Far overhead, the broad stone arc had been carved with the names of tens of thousands of Commonwealth soldiers with no known graves, lost in the war... the Great War, the First World War, World War I, whatever the kids called it these days.

Methos looked around the crowd, at tears and selfie-taking, inspiration and boredom. Then he looked at MacLeod and Ceirdwyn standing with him, solemn and serene. The two Celt warriors seemed like the monument itself, at once part of the present and the past. That solidity of character drew the eye. Methos made sure he faded in with the crowd.

Attending this — or any — Armistice Day centennial observance had not been Methos’s idea. For the damp chill, the speeches, and, most of all, the bagpipes, Methos fully intended to claim some warm, comforting payback from MacLeod when they got back to their hotel, plus several rounds of beer from Ceirdwyn.

That didn’t mean he didn’t feel the resonance.

When the speeches and music wound down, MacLeod gestured at the arc. “That’s another of the things this war changed, you know. We put the names of ordinary soldiers on monuments, now, not generals and kings.”

Precisely 54,609 names above, Methos had heard in one of the speeches. Out of, what, twenty million people killed? Numbers too big to fit in his mind. Killing too familiar to push out of his mind. He felt both closer to and further from Death than he had in years.

He didn’t know which scared him more.

“You’re right,” Ceirdwyn craned her neck for a better look. “Every soldier a citizen first. Equally worthy, equally sacrificing and sacrificed.” When she lowered her head, she sighed. “Well, maybe, someday, our thinking can change again, and we’ll commemorate the civilians by name, too.”

MacLeod put an arm around her shoulders and offered his other hand to Methos. “Maybe, someday,” MacLeod said, “we could even stop having wars that need commemorations. Adam, don’t laugh.”

“I am smiling, not laughing,” Methos informed him.

The three strolled together out through the gate into the cloudy day, each deep in his or her own memories.

Methos hadn’t managed to spend the entire war behind his desk monitoring relief shipments, nor taking Ceirdwyn and her foster daughters to the cinema when she’d brought them with her to the exchange in Virton. He hadn’t escaped losing friends and lovers in trenches, under bombs, to the influenza pandemic. That’s what you get for caring about people.

Many times, Methos had managed to stop caring. MacLeod and Ceirdwyn, though, each plunged on with open hearts, loving and losing again and again without relief. So sure the love was worth the pain. Seeing them both like this, amidst all the looking back, it hit Methos anew how dangerous they were.

Flames to his moth.

He and the other CRB delegates had been scrambling to leave Belgium when one of Ceirdwyn’s girls had died of measles. The US had finally entered the war, then, so CRB operations had needed to be turned over to the remaining neutral countries, and he’d had to get out, himself, before his passport went from neutral to hostile in German eyes...

Decades later, not too long before he’d met MacLeod, Methos had run into Ceirdwyn for the first time since the war. The memory of Lina’s death had leaped in her at the sight of him, he could tell.

Yet Marie and Alice had lived to grow up and grow old. And millions of civilians had not starved. 

“Ceirdwyn,” Methos asked lightly, “did you ever figure out that she was your Watcher?”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Harris. The Lace Committee member who kept commissioning stuff from you.”

“She liked my work.”

“She was your Watcher.”

“She liked my work!”

MacLeod laughed.

  


**— end —**

  


**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer.** This is fanfiction of _Highlander_ , which belongs to Davis/Panzer. Please don’t mistake it for anything else.
> 
> **Inspiration & canon.** For HLH_Shortcuts 2019, Lferion’s request included Ceirdwyn, Methos, first meetings, and history. Occupied Belgium came to mind with Ceirdwyn’s flashbacks resisting invaders. We know Duncan was in the ambulance corps then (“For Tomorrow we Die,” “The Colonel,” “Deliverance”); we don’t seem to know where Methos or Ceirdwyn were. The Watcher Chronicles say Ceirdwyn is a “designer” in the ‘90s, which, along with her decor, seemed compatible with a past in textile arts. (Also, a friend of mine makes bobbin lace.)
> 
> **Works consulted.** The title is a mouthful! _WWI Crusaders: A band of Yanks in German-occupied Belgium help save millions from starvation as civilians resist the harsh German rule_ by Jeffrey B. Miller (2018) seems to be the authoritative text in English about the relief effort. I was also able to reference the vintage _Women of Belgium: Turning Tragedy to Triumph_ by Charlotte Kellog (1917) and _An English Governess in the Great War: The Secret Brussels Diary of Mary Thorp_ edited by Sophie De Schaepdrijver and Tammy M. Proctor (2017). I streamed some news footage of the centennial commemoration at the Menin Gate.
> 
> **Beta.** Thank you so very much, Skieswideopen! You asked important, insightful questions that sent me to find and weigh the answers, making the story much better.
> 
> **Thank you for reading!** Let me know what you think?


End file.
